INDIAN hospitality firm OYO and German company Wirecard have announced that they are exploring collaboration opportunities to provide a suite of financial services to make payments for OYO hotels and home bookings across several regions in the world.
Wirecard will explore ways to enable OYO with its digital financial services and solutions, including payment acceptance, credential issuance, and payments technology, Wirecard said on Tuesday (20).
The collaboration between the Ritesh Agarwal-founded business and German financial services provider will span across international markets where OYO has a presence, including the UK, US, Europe, and South-East Asia.
As part of the collaboration, Wirecard will look to enable OYO with digital financial services such as payment acceptance and issuance system for OYO's online, mobile, and point-of-sale booking services.
The Bavaria-based firm will also work to enable OYO to leverage its banking platform to provide hassle-free payment experience to its customers.
Georg von Waldenfels, EVP Group Business Development at Wirecard, said: "OYO has truly revolutionised the hospitality space across the globe, and we are excited to be engaging with them as they take their business to the next level.
“The future of the travel industry is digital, with unified, integrated customer experiences across all channels — and this includes smooth and reliable digital financial processes such as we intend to provide to OYO around the world.”
Currently, OYO has an international presence with its hotels and homes business spread across the Indian subcontinent, China, South-East Asia, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Europe, and the US, among others.
Founded in 2013, OYO’s portfolio comprises more than 23,000 hotels and over 125,000 vacation homes in 800 cities across 80 countries.
OYO is a constituent of the SoftBank Vision Fund, which facilitated the introduction to Wirecard.
The Indian hospitality business does not build or own hotels. It approaches independent hotel owners and offers to invest to improve their business. Thus, the hotels are re-branded as OYO Rooms.
OYO is responsible for upgrading, reshaping, and altering the hotel rooms to improve facilities in a bid to attract more customers and ultimately, improve the hotel business significantly.
It also invests with owners to transform the property itself, improving the infrastructure and the look and feel of the hotel.
The culture secretary with Shailesh Solanki and Kalpesh Solanki from the Asian Media Group (AMG), publishers of Eastern Eye